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First of all, let me begin with great news: The Cyber Attacks Statistics page is complete with all the data collected so far: I created and inserted even the charts for January, so I am currently covering (and will cover) the whole 2012.

Now, after this small “self-gratification” it is time to look at the statistics derived from the Cyber Attacks Timeline for the first half of August. You will soon discover that this month has seen an (un)expected revamping of Hacktivism and consequently of his preferred weapon (DDoS), and preferred targets (governments). This is a consequence of the so-called OpDemonoid carried on by the Anonymous collective against the takedown of the famous Torrent Tracker (which in many ways reminded the most famous OpMegaUpload). But this is also a consequence of OpAustralia, the operation (successful since the law proposal is in standby) against the new Australian Internet Surveillance Law.

As far as the Motivations Behind Attacks are concerned, Hacktivism ranked at number on with nearly the 50% of the events. Cyber Crime ranked at number two (43%) while as usual Cyber Espionage and Cyber Warfare are well behind (but I wonder how many targeted attacks are acting in this moment, silent and undetected). It is interesting to notice the rise of events motivated by Cyber Espionage (three inside the interval taken into consideration): the Gauss Cyber Attack, the campaign against Saudi Aramco and the attacks against the Nepalese Government.

The winds of hacktivism have a clear influence even in the Distribution Of Attack Techniques which shows a new entry (as it were) at number one. Yes, in the first half of August the DDoS has overtaken the SQLi with nearly one third of the occurrences (31.9%) against the 21.3 of the latter. Only for the 17% of the attacks it has not been possible to identify with certainty the attack technique leveraged.

Clearly the hacktivism also influenced the Distribution Of Targets: nearly one cyber attack on five (among the sample considered), corresponding to the 21%, hit government targets. Targets belonging to the industry sector and to the news sector ranked at number two, both of them with the 13% of the occurrences. Apparently the first half of August has been particularly awful for the News Sector, thanks most of all to Thomson Reuters, that has been hacked three times in two weeks.

Again, I will never get tired of repeating that data must be taken very carefully since they do refer only to discovered attacks (the so-called tip of the iceberg), and hence do not pretend to be exhaustive but only aim to provide an high level overview of the “cyber landscape” of the considered period.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

The first half of August has seen a revamping of Hacktivism, encouraged by the takedown of the famous Torrent Tracker Demonoid (and the consequent OpDemonoid targeting most of all Ukrainian sites), but also encouraged by OpAustralia, the wave of attacks against Australian Web Sites carried on against the Australian Internet Surveillance Law (apparently the latter operation was successful since the controversial law has been put on standby).

But Hacktivism was not the only “trend topic” for this period. The Middle East continues to be the cradle for unexpected cyber weapons threats. In August, two new occurrences of allegedly state sponsored malware: Gauss, a cyber-espionage tool targeting bank transaction, and Shamoon , a destructive malware targeting energy companies.

These are probably the most remarkable Cyber Events of this period, which has also seen a purported giant breach targeting Pearl.fr, a French e-commerce website whose 729,000 accounts, together with over 1 million bank transaction details, have been subtracted by hackers.

If you want to have an idea of how fragile our data are inside the cyberspace, have a look at the timelines of the main Cyber Attacks in 2011 and 2012 and the related statistics (regularly updated), and follow @paulsparrows on Twitter for the latest updates.

Also, feel free to submit remarkable incidents that in your opinion deserve to be included in the timelines (and charts).

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About This Blog

In this blog I express my personal opinion, which does not necessarily reflects the opinion of my organization, about events and news or interest, concerning information security, winking to mobile world and, why not, to some curious personal event.

Every information is reported with its source.

Anyone intending to use the information contained in my posts is free to do so, provided my blog is mentioned in your article.